To discern is to distinguish what is dangerous from what is not, what is acceptable from what is not, what requires immediate action from what can wait. The difficulty begins when a useful judgement — a quick decision — turns into a reading of essence (“he is dangerous”, “she is toxic”, “he is a liar”) and hardens the way we enter into relationship.

Systemic thinking proposes a conceptual shift: instead of asking “who is this person?”, we ask “what makes this behaviour coherent within an interactional, familial, institutional, historical context?”. This shift is neither a denial of responsibility nor an excuse: understanding a relational function is not the same as justifying an act, especially in cases of violence or abuse. But it reduces the classic error of confusing an event, an interactional sequence or a survival strategy with a stable identity.

This text draws on a narrative review of founding references in family therapy and systemic intervention — structural, strategic and MRI, Milan, transgenerational, constructionist and narrative schools — as well as on work in social and cognitive psychology concerning heuristics, causal attribution, confirmation bias and self-fulfilling prophecies. The choice is deliberately integrative: it aims less at exhaustiveness than at building an explanatory model that is coherent and workable for clinical practice and psychoeducation.

Judgement as cognitive economy

In ordinary situations, we decide under constraints of time and information. Work on heuristics shows that the mind resorts to shortcuts that are efficient most of the time but liable to systematic errors (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974; Kahneman, 2011). The problem is not having a first reading, but treating it as a final truth.

A large share of relational suffering comes from confusing three things: a useful hypothesis (“I perceive a risk”), an identity conclusion (“this person is dangerous”) and a relational strategy (“I am going to act on the basis of that supposed identity”). It is this passage from hypothesis to essence, and then from essence to strategy, that makes judgement psychologically costly and relationally explosive.

From behaviour to “essence”

Social psychology describes a tendency: inferring stable dispositions (“he is just like that”) from behaviour that can largely be explained by the situation. This tendency is often called correspondence bias or, in its classic form, the fundamental attribution error. It leads us to underestimate the weight of context and to over-interpret personality. The examples are clinically frequent.

• “He interrupts me” → “he is domineering”.
• “She forgets” → “she does not care”.
• “The teenager answers back” → “he is disrespectful”.
• “He lies” → “he is a liar”.

In a systemic reading, these quick equivalences are precisely what we try to loosen — not in order to relativise the act, but to make complexity thinkable again: fatigue, shame, perceived threat, family loyalty, the place occupied among siblings, the marital coalition, implicit expectations, transgenerational history.

The systemic shift

Family therapy was historically built against the temptation to locate the problem inside an isolated person — the “identified patient” — by showing that symptoms and behaviours can be maintained by interactional loops, implicit rules and the system’s attempts at regulation. Early systemic authors notably put forward the idea that certain behaviours, including somatic ones, could take part in a relational stabilisation: what the tradition has often called family homeostasis (Jackson, 1957/1981).

This point is decisive for the question of judgement: if a behaviour is also a response to a relational configuration, then a global moral judgement (“he is the sort of person who…”) becomes a poor descriptive tool. Conversely, a typical systemic question is: “What is this behaviour trying to regulate, avoid or protect within this system?” That question does not exonerate. It produces clinical information: the possible function of the behaviour.

Behaviour as the “best attempted solution”

In the strategic school and the work of the Mental Research Institute, a central idea is that some problems are maintained by repeated attempted solutions: what we do to solve the problem becomes part of the problem (Watzlawick et al., 1974; Fisch et al., 1982). This logic is particularly useful for rereading judgements: sometimes, judging harshly is a costly attempted solution. We judge in order to protect ourselves, keep control, avoid vulnerability, maintain identity coherence, force the other to change, or reduce uncertainty.

From this perspective, a negative judgement can function as a relational “solution”.

• In a couple: “he does not care” licenses anger rather than sadness, and reduces exposure to rejection.
• In a family: “he is unmanageable” justifies a rigid parental coalition and avoids a deeper marital conflict.
• At work: “she is incompetent” makes it unnecessary to negotiate boundaries or expectations.

The clinical objective is not to forbid these judgements, but to understand their function and to open up less destructive alternatives.

Judgements that confirm themselves

Once a judgement is in place, we spontaneously look for elements that confirm our hypothesis and overlook those that contradict it. Work on the failure to eliminate hypotheses (Wason, 1960) and on testing strategies (Klayman & Ha, 1987) describes this mechanism well: we often test so as to confirm rather than to refute.

In a relational context, this cognitive bias becomes an interactional bias: judgement guides our micro-behaviours — tone, distance, watchfulness, sarcasm, withdrawal — which increase the likelihood that the other will react in a way compatible with our script. It is one of the paths by which self-fulfilling prophecies are built (Merton, 1948): the initial definition of the situation modifies conduct in such a way as to produce the dreaded outcome. In educational contexts, the effect of expectations (Rosenthal & Jacobson, 1968) illustrates the power of this mechanism: expectations modify interactions, and interactions modify performance.

In family clinical work, the phenomenon is visible when a member expects to be judged, anticipates condemnation, and adopts a defensive or aggressive stance… which triggers precisely the judgement expected. Relational systems then learn scripts: each becomes the living proof of the other’s scenario.

Distinguishing the act, the function and the person

One of the major confusions of ordinary judgement is mixing three levels. This distinction is compatible with several systemic traditions: it makes it possible to hold together responsibility, understanding and non-reduction of identity.

Narrative therapy, for its part, formalised a neighbouring idea through externalisation and the reconstruction of alternative stories (White & Epston, 1990).

This approach offers powerful vocabulary for reducing labelling: we move from “he is violent” to “violence invited itself into the relationship, in such and such contexts, with such triggers, and at such costs”. This does not trivialise: it makes the intervention more precise.

“Even your therapist judges you”

Yes, the therapist judges: they assess — dangerousness, consent, capacity for self-regulation — they discriminate — what helps and what does not — they prioritise — safety, alliances, objectives. The clinical question is therefore not “to judge or not to judge”, but “how to judge without reducing?”.

The Milan school proposed a discipline of clinical thinking: hypothesising rather than concluding, staying circular rather than linear, and practising an active neutrality. Cecchin (1987) reformulates that neutrality as an invitation to curiosity: a way of protecting oneself from quick certainties and their blaming effects.

In this tradition, positive connotation aims to attribute a protective intention, or a logic of loyalty, to a problematic behaviour, in order to reduce moral polarisation and open up alternatives. The idea is not to say “this is good”, but “this made sense within this system”. This move is particularly effective against labelling, because it unsticks identity from the act and puts movement back into positions (Selvini Palazzoli et al., 1978).

Circular and reflexive questions

The kind of question asked is already an intervention. Tomm (1987, 1988) notably distinguishes questions that reinforce linear causality (“who started it?”) from circular and reflexive questions (“what happens between you when…?”, “what do you think X imagines that you think?”). Reflexive questions have precisely the function of helping the family generate new descriptions of itself, rather than remaining prisoner of a frozen judgement.

Not-knowing and co-construction

In the constructionist approach, Anderson and Goolishian (1992) describe a not-knowing stance: the client is the expert on their experience, and the therapist refrains from locking in an interpretation too early. For the question of judgement, the relevance is direct: this stance acts as an antidote to capture by the first clinical impression. It keeps hypotheses open, and therefore keeps possible futures multiple.

That is precisely where the therapist’s stance is different: not because they would be pure or free of judgement, but because they train themselves to maintain a multiplicity of descriptions, to favour curiosity over condemnation, and to look for formulations that reduce blame while increasing responsibility.

The systemic approach offers a pragmatic alternative: turning judgement into a contextual hypothesis, distinguishing act, function and person, and using interventions — circular and reflexive questions, positive connotation, a not-knowing stance, the multiplication of perspectives — that reopen possibilities without denying the limits that are necessary.

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These markers are taken up and discussed on video just below, in French.